Less than two weeks. That’s how fast nearly a third of today’s job seekers are able to research, apply to, interview for, and accept a new role — according to a new study from Hireology. In other words, top talent goes fast. Businesses are looking to staff up as the economy recovers and those that are equipped to hire folks quickly are able to bring on the best of the best.
What’s more, 35 percent of respondents in the same Hireology study said that they applied to more than 16 jobs in their most recent job search. That means that these folks are extremely eager to get back to work. And as noted in the chart above, those who are qualified and skilled are able to land one of those positions quickly.
All of this to say that the current labor shortage is not the only thing preventing you from bringing top talent on board. The data shows that people who do want to get back to work are motivated and ready to get started now. So if you’re struggling to find the right people to fill open roles, chances are you’re moving too slow.
Now is the time to take a close look at your hiring processes and procedures to figure out what’s slowing you down, and identify adjustments you can make in order to get in front of today’s job seekers faster. Here are five tips to get you started:
Mandate faster response times
An easy change you can make right now is to mandate faster initial responses from your hiring managers to their job applicants. Don’t let your recruiters and hiring managers sit on applications for a few days. By then, the most qualified folks have already moved onto the interview stage with your competitors.
Think of your applicants like customers. Would you let a customer go a few days without a response? Of course not. You shouldn’t let job applicants go ignored either. At Hireology, we’ve put this in place for our teams. Our goal for any open position is to review any applicant within 24 hours of receiving the application, allowing us to connect with top talent faster.
Use smart tools to automate screening
Today’s job seekers are applying to more roles than they were before the pandemic. That means you’re likely getting more applicants than ever for your more popular roles. So how do you handle this extra workload? Manually screening resumes and applications to weed out those that are unqualified slows you down big time. Automating steps like pre-screen surveys will save you time and allow you to get to top candidates sooner.
Pre-screen surveys allow hiring managers to automatically prioritize top, qualified applicants by having them complete a brief series of true/false questions about their experience, availability and motivations. Surveys are scored automatically and added to their records, allowing recruiters to connect with those most likely to be great fits faster.
Look for bottlenecks
There’s a good chance that certain aspects of your hiring process are acting as a bottleneck. Take a step back and analyze the process in order to identify those roadblocks. Maybe you have too many folks who want to interview the candidate and it’s dragging the process out. In this case, you might opt for group interviews so that everyone can speak to the candidate in a shorter time frame.
Of course this doesn’t mean you should cut corners. Running objective interviews, giving skills tests, and conducting background checks are necessary, always. But it’s important to keep an eye on which steps are taking the most time and identify ways to operate more efficiently.
Go mobile
Another issue that is likely slowing you down is a simple lack of time. Your hiring managers and recruiters are running from meeting to meeting and don’t have time to sit at their desks waiting to quickly respond to a candidate. And this is even worse when folks are working from home and away from a traditional office setting.
If you give your recruiters and hiring managers the option to work from their mobile devices, they can complete critical steps like communicating with candidates or initiating skills tests while they’re on-the-go between meetings or even sitting on their couches at home. For Hireology users, we’ve seen that customers who use our app alongside our desktop experience are able to connect with job seekers twice as fast as those who rely on the desktop experience alone.
Don’t rely on email alone
Email is a great way to communicate with candidates, but it can slow you down. People don’t always have their email open and your message might be getting lost in a sea of marketing emails and other regular communications, causing candidates to take longer to get back to you. But most folks do have their phones on them at all times. So why not text them? In fact, Hireology customers have found that they’re able to hire folks up to eight days faster when they text candidates rather than relying solely on email.
Of course there’s only so much you can do to speed up your process if you’re relying on outdated or disparate technology to manage your hiring process. Jumping from platform to platform or spreadsheet to spreadsheet takes time — time you could spend reaching out to your next hire or scheduling an interview with a top candidate.
At Hireology, we bring all of your systems together into one platform. From the minute your applicants apply through new hire onboarding, everything you need to keep that candidate engaged and moving through the process is located in the same place. And Hireology dramatically reduces the manual, admin-intensive tasks related to bringing new folks on board. Schedule a demo to learn more about Hireology today.
